A Textual Analysis of Every U.S. General Election Debates
Dominic Russel
10/19/2020
Overview
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Including Plots
Why are Trump’s debates rated so… AFINN just gives a sentiment score. Here Trump uses a lot of very negative words
| Word | Sentiment Value | Share of Neg & Pos Words (%) |
|---|---|---|
| bastards | -5 | 0.08 |
| fraud | -4 | 0.50 |
| hell | -4 | 0.34 |
| catastrophic | -4 | 0.08 |
| fraudulent | -4 | 0.08 |
| bad | -3 | 4.79 |
| lost | -3 | 1.51 |
| worse | -3 | 1.09 |
| worst | -3 | 1.01 |
| horrible | -3 | 0.92 |
| win | 4 | 0.50 |
| amazing | 4 | 0.25 |
| winner | 4 | 0.25 |
| winning | 4 | 0.25 |
| wins | 4 | 0.17 |
| brilliant | 4 | 0.08 |
| fantastic | 4 | 0.08 |
| funny | 4 | 0.08 |
| miracle | 4 | 0.08 |
| outstanding | 5 | 0.08 |
| Word | Sentiment Value | Share of Neg & Pos Words (%) |
|---|---|---|
| lost | -3 | 0.50 |
| crisis | -3 | 0.38 |
| worst | -3 | 0.38 |
| killed | -3 | 0.25 |
| withdrawal | -3 | 0.25 |
| bad | -3 | 0.13 |
| destroy | -3 | 0.13 |
| destruction | -3 | 0.13 |
| died | -3 | 0.13 |
| disastrous | -3 | 0.13 |
| vitality | 3 | 0.25 |
| devoted | 3 | 0.13 |
| grand | 3 | 0.13 |
| popular | 3 | 0.13 |
| praised | 3 | 0.13 |
| prosperous | 3 | 0.13 |
| wealth | 3 | 0.13 |
| win | 4 | 0.38 |
| fantastic | 4 | 0.13 |
| triumph | 4 | 0.13 |
While the first plot showed that the sentiment in Biden’s 1st 2020 debate performance was generally lower than the average for past candidates, Biden individual debate performances haven’t been particularly negative. Here we highlight Trump’s four presidential debates and Biden’s two VP debates and one presidential debate.
Instead of words we can do something more sophisticated with full sentences using the package sentimentr.
And we can also look at emotion
One more thing we can do is PCA, using the..
We do lose some interpreitability, but essentially…
In 2004, they did debates focused entirely on one set of issues. This 2004 cloud was focused entirely on foreign policy and homeland security (was also a topic discussed at the Pence-Kaine debate).
Can’t be totally unique words (must be used in 10% of debates)
Instead we can do it only using…
Here Trump is truly in a league of his own… His supporters say he speaks in a different way…
A final look, below we present bigram word clouds…
